Quick Look: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

My backlog is too big already...! Must... resist... purchasing...!

OI WITCHAH!!!!

"I'm the worst witcher!"

*5 seconds pass*

"No way, I'm the best witcher."

Have been playing non-stop since this game launched. It's fantastic.

Make sum noize!

The game is awesome. The only disppointing thing is the lack of Polish voiceovers. Anyone know why that is?

On performance:

780 doesn't actually technically support hairworks, and that's probably the biggest single offender on FPS, as High defaults leave it enabled for Geralt. Disabling it altogether would potentially be a big gain.

@chadwick359: I run hair and other PhysX effects on my old 660 TI video card while I leave my 980 to run the games deliciousness with everything cranked up as high as it goes. So pretty and buttery smooth....

Vinny should disable hairworks.

Everyone should disable hairworks, actually, it's not worth it.

Probably just turning off the fancy "hair works" option in post processing would boost performance enough without having to set everything else to high, it pretty much doubled my frame rate.

Thanks for those video notes.

Edit: Holy shit that load time.

Review incoming?

Yea Vinny if you turn hairworks off you should be able to turn most things back up. It's most likely causing the hitching in those fights as well

If you bought the PC version from GOG you can dl German, French, Polish and Russian voice packs.

got this via GOG...almost forgot how great DRM-free is

Probably because the game doesn't take place in Poland and Americans don't like "weird" accents in their English games. Remembers "JASON!!!" ~Heavy Rain

You're conflating some weird things and making random assumptions here. It isn't that "Americans" don't like "weird" accents, it's that it's fucking hilarious in a game like Heavy Rain where everyone is supposed to be, according to the story, super American, and the kids sound like they fell straight out of a European sitcom and and the dad has a completely different accent altogether. It wasn't consistent, and it was hilariously bad because of it.

I'll keep my pretty hair. I've got plenty of horsepower in my rig and I use it on Ultra with HBAO+ thank you very much!

Even with hairworks off it doesnt run great at Ultra with my 780 card. Hairworks off and high setting gets me a smooth 1080p@60.

Thanks @vinny for adding the note! Now I know I can watch the first half and wait on the second!

@xbob42 said:

Look, ok, it's super hard for David Cage's multi-million dollar game to find a couple actors who can do a passable American accent for a story set in America. It's really, really hard, OK? It's not as if you can just use the resources available to you to put out a casting call for "actor who can do passable American accent" and then find suitable candidates. What do you want me to do next, find the Loch Ness monster while riding a pegasus?

Also, while we're pointing things out, it's incredibly hard for the Phoenix Wright games to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the series is set in Japan. Obviously it's way easier to just pretend that Maya's shrine maiden attire is something you would ever see in America, because I'm sure small children won't find that confusing as fuck.

Shit this game is good. The trees sway in the wind correctly. They fucking modeled tree wind swaying

GB East holding it down this week.

@bisonhero: How has my initial question spiralled into ragging on David Cage? Whatever the cause, I approve.

Sheesh. watching them fight the wraith. If they read the bestiary he'd kill it in under 10 seconds.

Vinny discovered her weakness by accident hah. And turn off hairworks. It looks good but tanks framerate.

Ya, a 780 really isn't a very good GPU anymore. Two generations behind. Surely GB can afford to pick up a modern card like a 970 or 980....

Man, those load times on the Xbox. This generation looks less impressive with every major release.

It's official, GBEast has the best transitions.

How awesome would it be to have that in shirt form?!?

"maybe we should have stopped now." well said Vinny

@amwbox: The 780 is only a generation behind, as nvidia skipped the 8 series for desktop GPU's. It's still a very good card.

That game would have been running just fine if the hairworks thing was turned off but yeah I do agree that GB should have a more modern card. Jeff was saying something about that so I think it would be more likely that GB HQ would be getting the newer card because theirs is even weaker than GBeast's one

I wonder if an SSD will help. On PC, with an SSD its near instant loads so I think running the game on an SSD in consoles might help.

This game is awesome I have just been wondering around doing quest ignoring main missions good times.

Game works hair setting really destroys the frame rate. so I would recommend people Turing it off until they fix it or optimize it.

To be fair gamesworks hair is bad across the board for Nvidia cards and AMD seem to be outperforming them right now. Its weird or are Nvidia trying force people to upgrade.

@reticulate: I can also still run most games maxed at 60fps with a 680. So a 780 definitely is not "not very good".

@amwbox said:

The 780 is one generation behind (not even two years old) and still an excellent card. Kepler GPUs don't perform well at all in this game for whatever reason, but a 780 isn't far off a 970 in general and still comfortably inside the top ten best single-GPU cards on the market.

@igniz12: Not really. There have been a lot of comparisons out there of load times on regular HDDs and SSDs in X1 and PS4 that the difference is minimal. Shaving off like maybe 3 seconds of load time isn't worth the premium for an SSD. There are other factors in consoles that cause the slow load times, not just the HDD speeds

man the terrible gamma on the xbox one to save resources looks pretty bad

Oh man......they didnt use the bestiary for Witching help :(

@slyspider: don't get too excited, it's default behavior for speedtree

Hairworks is such a performance killer. Which is a shame because it looks really nice on a lot of stuff. I'm on a 970 running with a blend of mostly Ultra and a few Highs, for what that's worth.

The characters in this game are so good from what I've seen so far. Animations and voice acting really bring them to life, and the conversations seem super well-scripted to sound like real dialogue between people rather than just stilted lines bouncing off one another.

But this is the only game you need! Trust me!

God damn, man going on and on about blood, stillborn babies, long load time, is this Bloodborne?

Also hunting.

It looks like PC game is running into a different spot from how it was with the last gen. When two gen old cards were still running games fine, but with this it seems like even the (reasonable) latest and greatest is only barely pulling its weight in performance. I wonder how it plays with 4k and all the bells and whistles. Need to upgrade my PC, but it doesn't seem like this generation of video cards will last.

This game is actually extremely well optimized. It runs at like 50 fps on my radeon 5770, a 5-6 year old card. It's just that some of the graphics options are very heavy on the performance. Especially the hairworks.

@baka_shinji17: Im playing in polish, im in uk playing the download version off psn. Options are eng ger ita fr and pl.

I want to play this game but i can already tell that i will not be able to read any of the text or the UI. It's too damn small!

As others have said drop the hairworks completely off. Then one of the foliage settings gives a big boost when you lower it.

I HATE the way this game feels the controls suck I don't think im going to play much longer. it makes me wonder if people are actually play testing games with controls like this, out of 5 of my friends that have it 4 of them think the game feels like crap.